Kashmir, and the loss of beautiful childhoods

Bookaholicanonymous cannot thank Sanchit Gupta enough for this beautifully written piece on his book exclusively for us. People pick up this novel its a winner!

Sanchit Gupta began his career as a part-time copywriter with an advertising agency in Mumbai. He went on to co-found his own theatre group, worked as a freelance film screenwriter and as executive producer–fiction for a leading television network. His short stories have been published in several esteemed publications and literary journals and have won acclaim in leading literary festivals and online forums. One of his film scripts (fiction) has been long-listed in a globally reputed screenwriters’ lab. He has worked with All India Radio as a talk show host and regularly features in poetry recitals at Prithvi Café, Mumbai. The Tree with a Thousand Apples is his debut novel.

Kashmir, and
the loss of beautiful childhoods

It is said that
an author writes the book as much as the book writes itself. I think an author
discovers the book he/she intends to write from the kind of person they are. No
matter what genre, the book is a reflection of that person and their view of the
world. Most importantly, it reflects how the world around them has impacted
them so hard that the book is merely an afterthought, a dam surging inside so
desperate to burst out that it bleeds all over the white sheets in front of
them.

Nearly a decade
before I wrote the first word of The Tree with a Thousand Apples, I was
a student who happened to read an article on the then ongoing conflict between
Israel and Hamas in Lebanon. I couldn’t understand much of world politics back
then, but what I could not forget was that the article was written from the
point of view of a ten year old boy. This boy had just lost his home, his town
and his family, even though he was not a part of Hamas and he was not an
Israeli. He was a Lebanese, the place which was not on either side of the
conflict. I found that very peculiar.

Irrespective of
how I felt, the boy had lost what he had lost. I too was a boy back then, and
how would I have felt if I had lost my family and my home at that age? There
won’t be any more birthday parties for him, he won’t play with the neighborhood
kids when the evenings dawned, he won’t be caught cheating during exams. No, it
was not just an attack on his home. What that boy had truly lost was his
childhood. He would have wanted to ask questions, but from whom? He must have
forged an enemy in his heart, a nameless one. Yet, even though I could read and
witness that, maybe I could not really understand it very well. Maybe because
as someone who had seen a very comfortable childhood, what could I have known
about the pain of losing one?

It was when I
was in Kashmir, the heaven on earth, that the anonymous boy from the article
came alive on the streets. I could see mute and stoic boys and girls who wanted
to laugh and cry, I could hear things they wanted to say but kept hidden behind
their little concealed smiles, just as the one in that photograph. Children of
army men who went to school every day fearing whether the bus they travelled in
would be blown up, children of civilians who couldn’t play cricket without
knowing if their playground may become a battleground soon, children of
Kashmiri Pandits languishing in camps of Jammu who seemed to have forgotten
how Kahwa is made. Children who had lost their childhood, who
were not on either side of the conflict, yet had grown to choose one. A side
where all of them were right and all of them were wrong. I could see that the
Lebanese boy in that article and his nameless enemy too were no one but the
same children.

The Tree with a
Thousand Apples is the
story of three such children who don’t just exist in Kashmir, they live with us
and around us. They don’t yet know the world they are in and all they want is
for us to find them. They know that if we don’t give them a home today, there
will be another boy in the future sometime, who too would lose his childhood.
They don’t want to tell us any of their grand stories because they have none.
All they want us to know is that their childhoods long for a birthday party and
neighborhood games, that they are just three children who were asked questions
they didn’t know the answers to—they are just children like us…

Sanchit welcomes interaction: @sanchit421. Find out more about the author and his work at www.sanchitgupta.in.

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